Zero 7 vs Air Album Reviews
The Garden may be future pop, but Pocket Symphony is over pop.
Once interchangeable darlings of downtempo, ambient techno outfits Air and Zero 7 have moved in opposing directions on Pocket Symphony/The Garden.
Comparisons to the French ambient techno duo, Air, have dogged UK former sound engineers, Zero 7, since the 2001 release of their first album, Simple Things. That’s about to change with the March release of Air’s Pocket Symphony, clearly a distinct entity from Zero 7’s The Garden (nominated for a Best Electronic/Dance Album Grammy).
If Zero 7’s latest is a “garden,” it’s anything but a classic English one, completely lacking as it is in direction or theme, and only loosely maintained as an organic unit by the vocals of Australian singer and former backup vocalist for Jamiroquai, Sia Furler, and Argentinean-Swede popper, Jose Gonzalez.
Zero 7 (Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker) came to prominence on the heels of a really quite good remix of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls” (Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich is a friend of theirs; he also produced Pocket Symphony), closely followed by the inclusion of their sadly melodious “In the Waiting Line” both on the soundtrack of Garden State and as HBO’s promotional music for its preview of the 2006 season.
And certainly there are worse things than being compared with Air, who approach their pieces from a sense of texture and whose straightforward influences—essentially the history of French popular music, from classical minimalism through 1960s jazz-infused chanson pop to 1970s proto-synthpop—are filtered through their own cerebral sensibility (one studied architecture, the other, math).
But Air, who had been increasingly toying with contemporary pop, have backed away from it completely in Pocket Symphony, reverting to their earliest influences. “Increasingly, we are trying to get away from the pop sound,” Jean-Benoit Dunckel says in their Web site bio. “I suppose we are influenced by modern composers like Philip Glass or even early 20th-century composers like Ravel or Eric Satie.”
They’ve also been influenced by their friendship with director Sofia Coppola (they scored her first feature film, The Virgin Suicides, and she used their “Alone in Kyoto” on the soundtrack of Lost in Translation) in that Nicolas Godin spent a year learning to play the koto and the shamisen from a Japanese master (John Lennon, anyone?). They’ve also begun using synth plug-ins from the French music research institute run by composer Pierre Boulez.
The resulting album is a melodic drift that is conceptually tight—“symphony” is appropriate for the title—if vaguely wallpaper-y at moments. The most captivating songs include “One Hell of a Party,” with its Dave Gahan-sings-Bowie vocals from Jarvis Cocker of Pulp; the instrumentals, “Mayfair Song” and “Night Song”; “Left Bank,” which channels—surprise—White Album-era Beatles; and the album’s first single, “Once Upon a Time,” which owes something to Philip Glass-style subtle chord progressions and takes “Alone in Kyoto” as its starting point, as the duo acknowledges.
Zero 7’s album, on the other hand, displays none of the systematic conceptualizing of Air.
Hardaker told one interviewer about their last album, When it Falls, “There was a real mood around that record, and we couldn’t really get beyond that. It’s of a different time, for me personally. I feel there are a lot of different voices on that record, it’s quite a lot to take in, emotions, language, stories - it’s quite laden with that.”
Apparently, the duo saw the moodiness of the album as a trap, because they’ve all but abandoned the heroin-y discoloratura of that style—a shame, actually, because the mood was what held the album together. The feel of The Garden is far more upbeat synthpop than their previous releases, and only the dejected titles--“Left Behind,” “Waiting to Die,” “Throw it All Away”--offer any mood carryover. In fact, “Throw it All Away,” sung by Furler and arguably the best song on the album, would feel at home on any pop chart.
The album is rife with derivative vocal and instrumental performances: Furler does Joni Mitchell in “Waiting to Die” and in one of the three worthy songs on the album, “You’re My Flame,” where the harmony, swirling electronics and 70s folk come together to create a centered POV. She even drifts off into Nelly Furtado/Natasha Bedingfield territory in some songs—intentionally, perhaps, if the goal is to top the pops; and González does James Taylor (if Taylor took to wearing a red string on his wrist and recording synthpop, it might sound something like “Today.”) and even Underworld--the Zero 7 cover of González’s own song, “Crosses,” sounds disturbingly like “Sola System.”
The guitar work, background vocals, harmony, even the ironic title of "This Fine Social Scene" are all pure Steely Dan; and "Your Place” sounds too much like Air's “J’ai Dormi Sous l’Eau” for coincidence.
Binns probably hit it on the head when he told an interviewer: “The holy shrine of the album should be dispelled and we should just carry on.” Well-conceived, nonderivative singles certainly seem to be the best way forward for this duo.
